


malingering

by slybrunette



Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-18
Updated: 2013-10-18
Packaged: 2017-12-29 18:25:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1008589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>post 4x05. <i>she counts up from zero, now, instead of down to it.</i> lexie dewitt's first few weeks in haven.</p>
            </blockquote>





	malingering

**Author's Note:**

> This, quite honestly, solves very little and speculates a hell of a lot. Also, long time writer, but it's my first time in this particular sandbox so go easy on me.

“How long do you think you can keep this up before - “

 

 

She clings to him like she thought the world might’ve ended. 

Duke breathes damp heat against her skin, but the rhythm of it is carefully mechanical, and the sigh of relief she glimpsed in the half-second before her body collided with his got swallowed up by something else. The heel of his hand pressed between her shoulder blades, the weight of it, keeps her there, and she doesn’t think it’s entirely about the fear of letting her go so much as the fear of what she’ll see written on his face once he does. 

It takes time to pull his armor back on and he prefers not to do it in the presence of others, she remembers, so he holds her there until he can fashion a smile out of the last reserves of his strength, worn down by Nathan’s belligerence and the energy required to keep quite so many balls in the air, and she does the polite thing by pretending to believe in it. 

 

 

 

There are so many things she doesn’t let herself say to him.

Like, _I’m sorry._

Like, _I missed you._

Like, _I don’t know how to fix this either._

“So what’s the plan?” He asks, after the Gull’s cleared out for the night and she’s washed the last remnants of Lexie down the drain in a swirling mess of dark eyeliner. There are four walls and three locks standing in between them and the rest of the world, but he still keeps his voice down and she still can’t force herself to relax past the very edge of the couch. “You do have a plan, right?”

This morning she had the bare bones of one, formulated on the fly with the sound of blood rushing in her ears and her fingers forcibly molded around a gun pressed to her partner’s chest. It had a pretty simple list of steps, too, being that one was to get the gun away from Nathan, at all costs, and two was to do it in such a way that didn’t get either her or Duke shot in the process. If that meant carrying on as Lexie for the foreseeable future, then fine. She could forge something new and only mildly painful with Duke. She could figure out how to put Nathan back together even if he hated her for who he thought she wasn’t. She could solve the troubles and fix the town and carry on the ruse for as long as it took, and the truth of the matter is she hadn’t thought past that to a more permanent solution. Without knowing all the variables, without the necessary context, she hadn’t thought she’d need to, not for a long time. 

It’s all going to hell eventually, whether she’s Lexie or Audrey, and, anyways, Duke was always very good at making people underestimate him. At seeing the reality of the situation whether it benefitted him or not. He looked at Lexie and saw _her_ , where everyone else had failed to, and that just proves how much all of this is just a bandaid on a bullet hole. Sooner or later, she’ll slip up in front of the wrong person. 

So, no, she’s got nothing, and maybe she never really did, but she can’t get those words out any more than she can the others. 

“Why would I need a plan?” She asks, instead, just this side of too bright, hopeful. “I’ve got you.” 

It falls flat, but then that was really the best she could hope for. 

 

 

 

She gets an earful about The Guard’s recent machinations, about Jennifer’s connection to the barn masquerading as schizophrenia and how he came to know her, about Nathan’s attempts at starting up fight club where the only rule was he didn’t fight back. About what Jennifer told them on the ride back to Haven. 

“Someone I love,” she clarifies.

“Yeah, that’s what I just said.” 

“No,” she shakes her head, tired and made uneasy by the topic at hand. “It’s not the person I love the most, it’s not - it’s not my one true love, it’s _someone_ I love.” When his apparent confusion doesn’t lessen, she lets her gaze fall to her hands and adds, “You can love more than one person. You can love someone and not...there are different kinds of love.”

Duke swallows and looks away from her. 

She figures that’s warranted.

“Nathan still can’t know anything about this.” 

“Don’t worry. If there’s anything I’ve learned from the past few weeks it’s that it’s better for everyone involved if Nathan’s left out of the loop for as long as possible. Better for him, too.” His tone speaks to having had to learn that the hard way and he’s silent for a beat before he says, “He’s just not thinking straight anymore.”

Audrey thinks about him back at the hospital, how he’d been so blindly willing to trust Duke, how he’d left the key in the door and failed to turn around, to react, the second he saw the room was empty, his reflexes dulled, his mind elsewhere.

“Yeah,” she sighs. “I’d noticed that.”

 

 

 

Duke heads down to close up shop, and she falls asleep on the couch only to be woken up fifteen minutes later by the sound of a car door slamming. She pads barefoot out onto the deck for long enough to register the presence of the Bronco parked out front, double checks the locks on her door, and then spends the next few hours staring at the ceiling above her bed before drifting into unconsciousness. 

 

 

 

Two days later, she’s navigating a sidewalk crowded with pedestrians and ducking under police tape. 

There’s a guy who’s pretty much been turned into a stone statue lying face-down in the crosswalk and Nathan is holding two cups of coffee - minus the cardboard sleeves, she notes, barely concealing a hiss as she adjusts her grip on the one he hands to her. It’s Audrey’s usual, which generally means it’s yet another thing for Lexie to complain about, but Nathan is distracted enough that she lets it slide.

“You know, this would be easier if you let me have my old office back,” she muses, after the prerequisite song and dance about how this is the absolute weirdest thing she’s ever seen, instead of just another Tuesday morning in Haven. Nathan gets hung up on the possessive. “ _Audrey’s_ old office back. Whatever.” There’s a tick in his jaw at her flippant tone, and it aggravates her roughly as much as she seems to aggravate him, so she presses, “It might as well be mine, if you’re going to run around telling everyone else I am her.” 

He takes a long, deep breath that looks to be as much about summoning the last dregs of his civility as it is restoring air to his lungs, before he says, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

What he means is that her old office - which used to be their old office - is now his new office since Dwight took over, and he isn’t going to be as effective by half if she’s in there with him all day, looking like someone he wants but can’t have. Audrey understands that, can see all the ways that this is unfair to him and how much damage she’s doing in the process of trying to save him. Lexie doesn’t, though, couldn’t possibly, so all she has to react to is this man who won’t cut her a break, even after she’s proven herself. “Okay, I know my memory’s not the most reliable, but I’m pretty sure I got cornered in the Chief’s office yesterday and told - not asked, _told_ \- that I was going to act as a consultant for you guys, since I’m all special and immune to these trouble-things that keep cropping up around here. And I was cool about that, even though I’m not really sure why the cops are taking their orders from some old dude who runs the newspaper, but I kinda think that means I rank my own office, or at least half of yours.”

Nathan stares her down. Watches her twirl her hair and cock her head in a way that’s half-playful, half-expectant, and then - switches topics on her fast enough to give her whiplash. He wants to go back and talk to the ME more about rigor mortis and she wants a stiff drink, at something like nine in the morning. Really. That’s not Lexie talking, that’s her. That’s _always_ her. 

The ME’s rattling off some line about crossbridging between actin and myosin, and making it fairly clear that she knows it’s a line, when Duke pulls up. She lets him handle Nathan. They bounce off each other shockingly well for two people whom she used to have to separate like kindergartners who refused to play nice, and part of her finds it moderately amusing that she’s apparently landed in a universe where Nathan favors Duke over her. Where Nathan hears the phrase _your friend_ in relation to his oldest enemy and doesn’t rush to correct her. 

It might be the one good thing to come out of this whole ordeal, if she’s searching for silver linings. 

 

 

“And this William guy? You don’t think he was another Howard?” 

Duke has brought wine with him, this time. Wine that is now halfway to empty and, yeah, most of that is her. She swallows the rest of what’s left in her glass and listens to the sharp bark of laughter that’s audible from downstairs, the Gull still in full swing for the evening with Wade Crocker at the helm. It’s not an arrangement Duke appears entirely happy about, but it also doesn’t seem like one he can avoid. A small, selfish part of her is almost glad for it, if it means more time spent with the one person she can literally be herself around. 

She curls her feet underneath her, and shakes her head. “No. With Howard, it was always like pulling teeth. You had to ask the exact right question before he’d give you anything. I didn’t have to ask with this guy. He _wanted_ me to know who I was. He wanted me to come back here and - I don’t know. Break the cycle, maybe?”

He considers this, for a long moment, then says, “Well, Nathan did shoot Howard full of holes. I guess it’s not the worst thing if it took.” 

“Except now the barn is gone, probably for good, and we have no idea if the troubles can be ended without it, even if I - “ she can’t even get the words out while speaking in hypotheticals, “which is not happening. All we know is that I went in this time and they didn’t stop.”

“Because the barn was imploding,” he supplies.

“Because the barn was imploding,” she repeats, briefly caught up in a memory of opening her eyes to see pitch-black voids eating at what had been the Oatley Tap Room. Except that had been Lexie’s delusion, and Lexie’s memories to boot. All of this was, and she wonders if the weakening of the barn’s internal structure is what contributed to her ability to remember all of these things about Lexie, about who she was and how she felt, in ways that she’s never been able to tap into with Lucy or Sarah.

She wonders, too, how William fits into all of this. Because if he hadn’t just been some reincarnation of Howard, sent to mess with her head, then why had he looked at her like he knew her from another life? Like maybe, in that other life, he had cared about her. Like maybe he still did. 

And she had left him behind.

“William told me that he was sure we would meet again,” she says, carefully, trying to recall specificities like phrasing, like tone, while she still can. While the details are still relatively clear, the memories less than a week old and only just starting to fade around the edges.

“What do you think that means?”

“I don’t know,” she admits. Reaches for the bottle and then catches herself, snatches her hand back and burrows further into the cardigan she’d pulled around herself once she’d shed Lexie like a second skin, all leather and darkness. Duke watches her, and although she can’t describe the exact expression on his face, it _hurts_. She turns away from him. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

 

 

Audrey dreams of wrecking her car on the cliffs, just as she did her first day in Haven, only that old Captain & Tennille won't stop playing no matter how many times she tempts fate by leaning forward to change the station, a persistent loop of _love will keep us together, think of me, babe, whenever_ accompanying the lurch of the vehicle, mocking her while she waits for a knock on the passenger side window that never comes.

 

 

Incrementally, Nathan warms to her.

Which is to say that he comes around to the idea that she’s a fast learner and thus never, ever attempts that tone that said _the adults are speaking now_ on her again. By day seven he only snaps at her half as much, and it’s almost always accompanied by an immediate softening of tones in place of the apology that he’s never been any good at making. She learns to bite his head off when he crosses lines or takes liberties, and he learns to be sheepish about it rather than combative, and, mostly, it works. 

Duke’s presence at the police station drops off steadily, now that he doesn’t have to play go-between as much, even if his presence in her apartment doesn’t. He has his brother to worry about, and a woman living on his boat that she probably owes her life to; Audrey tries not to think too hard about that last part. It leaves her with Nathan, most of the time, hours spent inside the office he finally comes around to letting her share, her role there tentative and unofficial, but out in the field it also leaves her with Dwight and that’s an infinitely more dangerous prospect.

Nathan might be prone to taking the words coming out of her mouth at face value, based upon an instinctual urge to trust her that comes, she thinks, from the trouble he has delineating between personas, but Dwight has no such inclination. What he lacks in personal knowledge of her, of Audrey, he makes up for in wariness. The list of people he trusts is either short enough to count off on one hand or nonexistent, and most days she leans towards the latter. He doesn’t have friends. He maybe has allies. She isn’t sure she ever fell into any of those categories, for him, and that distance from the situation gives him the kind of perspective that makes every encounter an exercise in waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

In waiting to see which side he lands on when it does. 

 

 

 

She counts up from zero, now, instead of down to it.

It’s strange, being able to roll over and blindly grope for the snooze button without feeling guilty about it. Nathan doesn’t expect her at the station until nine, doesn’t get cross about her absence until after ten unless there’s a case, so some mornings she lingers. Takes the extra five minutes it affords her, the ability to sleep soundly through the night escaping her - her body wound far too tight, her mind too full of what ifs - but the ability to relax slowly, slowly returning to her. 

The Hunter meteor storm isn’t due again for at least another twenty-six years, and the barn that comes with it is destroyed. She saw it with her very own eyes, and if the cycle that’s been playing out for dozens - maybe hundreds - of years holds true then that means -

Her time here is no more finite than anyone else’s. 

So, yes, she lingers. Stands under the hot spray of the shower long enough for her skin to shade faintly pink. If Duke is downstairs, she’ll make a detour on the way to her car. His staff will usually just be coming in, sometimes Jennifer, never his brother, but she’ll make benign small talk, and sometimes, when she’s a little early and it’s just the two of them, he’ll make her breakfast. Waffles. Safe, as breakfast foods go, free of associations. 

Nathan finds her there on the fifteenth day, sitting up at the bar and laughing with a fork halfway to her mouth, Duke in front of her, grinning wickedly while he polishes glasses and lines them up against the wall. They are otherwise alone, and Duke loses some of his good humor when he gets a look at the expression on Nathan’s face, tired and haunted and confused, by her, by him, by the ease of their interactions. Audrey drops the fork and chews at her bottom lip, before realizing that nervousness is not an emotion Lexie has when confronted with Nathan, no matter what’s written on his face. Tries for casual when she asks what’s up. 

He pulls himself together in the span of time it takes to blink and clear his throat, then tells her that someone in town is freezing objects and he’s worried people might be next. 

“Like a weather trouble?” 

It’s too fast and too specific, his gaze turning suspicious. She supposes it could be worse. She could’ve actually thrown out Marion Caldwell’s name as a potential suspect.

“I might have told her some stories,” Duke suggests, while she’s still trying to get her mouth working again, and thank god for him because she isn’t sure how she would’ve talked her way out of that one. “I might have also left out the part where Marion has been - relocated.”

“You told her - “ he starts, trailing off deliberately, the rest unspoken.

Duke shrugs. “She needed to know.” 

Audrey doesn’t know what it is they’re referring to anymore, just that she doubts they’re speaking of her own interactions with Marion exclusively, but Nathan seems to accept Duke’s words as fact, and she lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. 

 

 

“How long do you think you can keep this up before he figures it out?”

She -

 

 

The case requires a visit to the Herald, and a look through their archives. 

Dave treats her more or less the same as he always has, albeit with slightly more of an edge that, from what she’s gathered from Duke, probably has to do with whatever caused him to start waving a gun around and demanding that they leave their door closed, lest something else come through. Vince, on the other hand, offers none of the kind smiles and friendliness he’d bestowed upon Audrey but is, instead, generally uncooperative and completely done with playing innocent about it.

“He _really_ doesn’t like me,” she says, once they’re back outside. 

Nathan fumbles for his keys and mutters a half-hearted reassurance to the tune of: “It’s not just you.” 

“Really? Because I’m sensing a theme here. He couldn’t get rid of me fast enough, that human taser woman hates my guts only slightly less than she seems to hate yours, and you - you _definitely_ are not my biggest fan.” 

He has the decency to look ashamed about that. “I don’t - “ he stumbles, eyes fixed on the ground under his feet. “I like you just fine.” 

“But you wish I was her.” 

It stops him in his tracks, and for a moment she thinks he’s going to try and deny it, wants to tell him not to bother. She wishes she could be Audrey too. For him but, more importantly, for herself. Her sense of identity is fragile enough without putting on an act all day, every day, and, for all that it’s eating away at him, it’s wearing her down too. It makes being around him that much harder now and she considers the irony of that, when all she had wanted seven months ago was just a few more days by his side. 

“Look, it’s okay if you do, I - “

“There’s not a person I wouldn’t trade for her,” he tells her, brokenly, more so than she’s seen him since she’s been back, “but it’s not your fault that you’re not her. I don’t hate you. I don’t - resent you. You’re good at this, very good at this, it’s just sometimes - “

She reaches for him. Because Audrey wants to and Lexie has never been shy. Just her hand on his arm, skin-to-skin contact prevented by the sleeve of his jacket, and he doesn’t twitch away from her. It’s brief and about as impersonal as she can make it while somehow still being a gesture of comfort, and she lets her hand drop as she finishes his thought for him, “Sometimes she’s all you see.” 

He nods, something like surprise underwriting all of the sadness there, and she has to climb into the truck and let her cheek rest against the cool glass window to keep from crying right there on the spot. 

 

 

“Do you think it would make it any worse?”

“Do I think what would?”

“If I told him.”

“Audrey - “

“I mean, what’s he going to do? Put a gun in my hand again? Threaten to tell The Guard? Does he think he can really just tell me to - “

“Audrey,” Duke repeats, warning tone, and he’s grabbing for her, taking the beer bottle out of her hand and setting it down in a ring of condensation on her coffee table, curling the fingers of his other hand around her wrist. 

She exhales. Moves imperceptibly closer and fights the ever-present urge to lean forward, to lean on him. She’s been doing that a lot lately, but so far she’s managed to escape it in the physical sense of the word and even that, now, is questionable. “I don’t want to keep doing this,” she says, scrubbing the hand that he’s not holding onto over her face. “I can’t keep doing this.” 

“Hey,” his fingers find the line of her jaw, her chin, forcing her to look at him, “we’ll figure this out, okay? And if he has to know, if you have to tell him, then we’ll deal with that too. Maybe - “ he looks up, looks away, grappling for words, and she turns her cheek into his palm, closing her eyes against the feel of him, against the reassuring sound of her own name still hanging in the air. Anchoring her. “Maybe he wouldn’t have been able to deal with it before, but he’s been better since you came back. Not normal - although I would argue that Nathan has never been normal, for the record - but definitely not as crazy suicidal as he was. He’s even solving cases instead of just dismissing witnesses before they’ve even been properly questioned.”

Of all things, it’s that that gets a smile out of her, small and partially hidden, but there. 

“Thought I could get you to smile,” he admits, and then pulls back, because there’s comfort and then there’s tempting fate into a replay of what happened in Colorado. She’s been on the Cape Rouge in the morning, seen Jennifer sitting out on the deck drinking freshly-squeezed orange juice and reading a book, perfectly at home, and she knows a missed opportunity when she sees one. He’s trying to move on. He thought he had to, before, and now that he knows it’s possible, that he can, he’s doing everything to keep from relapsing. She can’t fault him for that. 

“Thank you,” she says, and the words are too simple, too insufficient to properly express her gratitude to him, for tonight, for all the other nights, for everything, but it’ll have to do until she figures out a better alternative.

And she will. 

And they will. 

 

 

 

_fin._


End file.
